As a student at the Faculty of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, I was allowed to take classes in sculpture. We had a foundry and could do both cast bronze and aluminum. We had welding equipment and could work on steel structures. And we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted to. It was a very strange feeling to have so few constraints: no zoning laws, no building codes, etc. But there was still a structure to be built, there was still the need to cast vision into metal.

Cast aluminum.

For the first time I was confronted with issues that hadn’t played a big role until then in architecture: ownership and access, original and copy. A library is owned by the city but everyone has access to the building. Even private buildings are seen by everyone and become part of the common urban landscape. The ownership of the art object normally results in taking it out of circulation and restricting access to it.

Cast bronze.

A design can easily be reproduced many times, suburban subdivision housing offering good examples of multiple copies. Stories, movies, photos, and songs can be made available to almost anyone and they actually increase in value the more people like, buy, and own them. But if you make multiple copies of a sculpture you somehow devalue it. And people normally want to know which one is the original and which are the copies.